WAFB: New website to provide free resources to thousands of La. children with developmental disabilities. Louisiana, not Los Angeles. “The Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF) launched a new website Wednesday, Exceptional Lives Louisiana, which has been two years in the making…. With a few clicks, families can find the resources they need to help their child with Autism or other developmental challenges. The website includes step-by-step guides that can be tailored for each family with just a few questions and help them do things like understand a diagnosis, apply for benefits, or even find a service provider like a therapist or social worker.”

Newswise: ASTRO Journal Advances in Radiation Oncology Now Indexed in PubMed Central. “Advances in Radiation Oncology, the newest journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), is now indexed by PubMed Central, a free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences literature organized by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Library of Medicine. All articles previously published in the journal are included in PubMed.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Met: Celebrating Six Months of Open Access, plus The Met on Google BigQuery. “It’s been six months since The Met launched its Open Access initiative, which made available all 375,000+ images of public-domain works in The Met collection under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). During what is just the dawn of this new initiative, the responses so far have been incredible.” Don’t miss the bit on BigQuery!

GeneaPress: Launching new FreeCEN website (PRESS RELEASE). “FreeCEN offers a free-to-search online database of the 19th century UK censuses. Transcribed entirely by volunteers, we have more than 32 million individuals available on our website that anyone can search without having to create an account. The new ‘FreeCEN2’ website (https://freecen2.freecen.org.uk) will launch on Monday 31st July 2017 with all of the records that the current website holds, but with a fresh new look and feel in-line with Free UK Genealogy and FreeREG.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 10 Best Tools to Create Animated Videos of 2017 . “…creating captivating videos is easier said than done, especially if you’re using the traditional video editors like Adobe Premiere or iMovie. But, there is a solution to that i.e. using video creator tools designed especially to create animated, explainer videos. These tools help you make explainer or training videos using simple drag-and-drop interface, and offer lots of customization features including video clips, photos, etc. Have I got your interest? Alright then, let’s check the best video creators to create short, animated, explainer or training videos.”

The Telegraph: 16 secret WhatsApp features that everyone should know about. “Whatsapp has swiftly grown from a small startup to one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, with over one billion users. While you may use it every day, you might be unaware of the cool tricks and secret features hiding in the app. Here are our favourite 16.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

UK Web Archive Blog: The Proper Serious Work of Preserving Digital Comics. “I definitely didn’t apply for a three month placement at the British Library just to have an excuse to read comics every day. Having a number of research interests outside of my PhD topic of illustrated novels (including comics and library studies), I am always excited when I find opportunities which allow me to explore these strands a little more. So when I saw that the British Library were looking for PhD placement students to work in the area of 21st century British comics, I jumped at the chance.”

Sunlight Foundation: What we’ve learned about the Trump administration’s changes to government websites won’t shock you. “Over the past seven months, we’ve seen changes to federal agency websites, including at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of the Interior, and the State Department, as well as changes to the White House’s website. These updates include changes to websites that provide educational information, insight into the obligations and past actions of agencies, plans and work toward upcoming policy, and access to and context for government documents. These sites have spanned topics like climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, clean water, agriculture, animal welfare, and general science policy.”

BBC News: ‘Bollywood blocks the Internet Archive’. “Access to the Internet Archive is being barred within India. The move appears to be the result of two Bollywood production companies attempting to stop pirated copies of their films being viewed online within the country.”

University of Washington: Rain increases joint pain? Google suggests otherwise. “Some people with achy joints and arthritis swear that weather influences their pain. New research, perhaps the deepest, data-based dive into this suggestion, finds that weather conditions in 45 U.S. cities are indeed associated with Google searches about joint pain. But it might not be the association you’d expect.”

The Atlantic: The Invisible Poems Hidden in One of the World’s Oldest Libraries. “The library at Saint Catherine’s Monastery is the oldest continually operating library in the world. Among its thousands of ancient parchments are at least 160 palimpsests—manuscripts that bear faint scratches and flecks of ink beneath more recent writing. These illegible marks are the only clues to words that were scraped away by the monastery’s monks between the 8th and 12th centuries to reuse the parchments. Some were written in long-lost languages that have almost entirely vanished from the historical record. But now these erased passages are reemerging from the past.” Good morning, Internet…

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